11 December—St. Louis de Montfort parishioners who faithfully worship at Litchfield’s St. Anthony of Padua Church claim to be unceremoniously freezing their ears, hands, noses, and other parts off in the red-brick church on South Street. And Roman Catholic clergy are getting lousy press. (Except Pope Francis, of course, because he’s disarmingly liberal.) So it’s refreshing to report that a Roman Catholic prelate has made headlines for doing the right thing.

Bishop Antonio Stagliano, who shepherds the diocese of Noto in Sicily (where the Mafia comes from and continues to thrive, but that’s probably irrelevant), recently told a group of kids that Santa Claus didn’t really exist. Bravo, Vescovo! And mazel tov! It was high time the church came clean with that bit of bullshit. A small step for the church, a giant leap for the truth.

But no good deed goes unpunished. So the diocese’s PR guy, the Rev. Alessandro Paolino, used the imprimatur of Facebook to put a politically astute spin on his boss’s revelation: The bishop, it seems, was merely trying to teach the kids the true meaning of Christmas. We won’t go into details, but it involves gifts. The cover of the L.L. Bean catalogue I received yesterday agrees with the PR priest that “The Joy is in the Giving.” Especially when you buy your gifts from L.L. Bean. The true meaning and spirit of Christmas.

(Editor’s note: Speak for yourselves, Father Alessandro and L.L. The joy is really in the receiving.)

Bishop Stagliano didn’t do his homework, however. He told the disabused bambini that Santa’s red costume was created by the Coca-Cola Company as a publicity gimmick. Not quite. It was actually Thomas Nast, the political cartoonist who came up with the Republican elephant symbol, who created the modern version of Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly in the late nineteenth century. Coca-Cola merely tweaked and popularized the image during the Depression.

When I was a bambino, my mother took my brother and me to Macy’s or Gimbels a few times to bug the phony Santa. My brother and I had been disabused from birth. Mother always referred to Santa as Bupkes. For years I believed that Bupkes was the Yiddish name for Santa. I must have been about seven or eight when I discovered that bupkes actually meant “absolutely nothing, bullshit” in Yiddish. And so it has been ever since, world without end.

Heaven forfend that children should know the truth about Santa Claus, Father Christmas, or any other iteration of the benevolent Christmas elf. As grownups know, the only real and dependable Santa Claus is the welfare state.

And did anybody mention Advent?